How to use Hotjar to validate assumptions (and stop guessing)

Teams validate assumptions to bridge the gap between uncertainty and understanding. It's usually done early on to avoid making (costly) mistakes and have the opportunity to test new assumptions that may be closer to the truth.

This blog provides a simple framework you can adopt to verify assumptions and iterate fast. All you need is the issue or challenge, adequate data, Hotjar's tools and features, and your team's combined expertise.

A 7-step framework to reduce assumptions and validate ideas

If your ultimate goal is creating a product people love, gut instinct only gets you so far. Proximity to your website or product can cloud your judgment, and your perceptions might differ vastly from your users’. 

When you make rash decisions—and fail to validate assumptions with hard data—you risk:

We all know better than to hold on to weakly validated assumptions. So here’s the framework we promised to help you move quickly and confidently with your product decisions:

1. Spend time in the problem space

As we said earlier, you need enough data to determine what’s blocking users from what they want to achieve. Take the time to empathize with them while searching for clues from qualitative and quantitative data sources.

Hear from customers: talk to customers about their actual experience, including what they hate or love about your product—and what they need from it. Use tools and tactics like user interviews, surveys, and feedback to capture people’s thoughts and feelings.

Gather user behavior data: find out what users are doing on your app or site to bridge the gap between what they say and do. Hotjar tools like Recordings and Heatmaps offer an objective view of visitor interactions to solidify your user research.

Once you’ve gathered the data, give your team space to analyze it thoroughly. Identify patterns and topics repeatedly appearing among users and across data sources. Then, define key user problems by developing discovery questions and hypotheses.

For example, imagine a product team just released a new online calendar tool for time management and meeting coordination. They might ask:

• How can we help our users integrate our solution into their workflow?

• Why aren’t people using our new product? Is another calendar software fulfilling their jobs to be done, or are they just reluctant to adopt a new tool?

User research and problem identification are both stages of product discovery, a process involving continuous research and validation to build effective solutions for problems. Excellent product discovery cuts through assumptions, improving resource allocation and generating actionable insights that guide product design and delivery.

2. Turn your assumptions into hypotheses

This means creating a strong hypothesis instead of simply assuming aspects of your users’ experience. Leandro Lima, a former UX designer at Google, defines a hypothesis as “a logical assumption about how things will behave.”

However, not all hypotheses are created equal—some are good, and others are not-so-good. 

An example of the latter would be, "Create a good design to make users happy." 

Why? Because it raises questions such as what is considered ‘good’ design? and the slightly more philosophical, what defines happiness?

On the other hand, a good hypothesis should be testable, measurable, falsifiable, and consist of an independent variable (something being manipulated) and a dependent variable (the outcome being measured). 

Here's an example: "A pink button (independent variable) that will generate 15% more clicks (dependent variable).”

3. Watch recordings and create heatmaps to test your hypotheses

Now it’s time to deepen your website analysis by going back to the data. Continuing with the example above, let’s say you based the ‘pink button’ hypothesis on session recordings of users skipping the CTA button. You plan to replace the existing button with a color that has more contrast but doesn’t deviate from the site’s color palette.

In this case, you’ll want to view additional data, such as relevant heatmaps displaying scroll depth and clicks. Heatmaps validate or disprove ideas, so you can be sure about what to do or not do. For instance:

• Another clickable element is confusing users and causing them to ignore the current CTA button. In this case, your best bet is to go ahead with your initial plan of introducing a pink button.

• The CTA button does not appear above the fold, so people tend to miss it if they don’t scroll further. This requires changing not only the button’s color but also its location on the page.

4. Incorporate user feedback with each iteration

Complement heatmaps and recordings (what users do) with feedback from real users (what they say). By adding Hotjar’s Feedback widgets and Surveys on your site, you can ask customers about your product or website directly. This straightforward access to what they feel, think, and experience comes with a slew of benefits, such as:

• A clear understanding of features that meet or fail to meet customers’ needs

• Better prioritization and customer-led decision-making: know what to keep, remove, or change

• Strategic use of time and funds, so you can create the best product possible

5. Share insights with stakeholders

It’s crucial to build a culture of validating assumptions across the company. So whether you’re on bug-busting, site audit, or laidback research mode (if the latter is ever possible), make it a habit to share your findings with various stakeholders.

For effective cross-functional collaboration, demonstrate the extent of user research everyone can do (especially with Hotjar tools and features😉):

• Schedule time together (see: Watch Parties ⬆️) to analyze recordings and observe how people use your product or navigate your website in real life. This will help your team understand and empathize with your users’ perspectives.

• Organize your recordings based on your most relevant set of filters with segments: Hotjar has a range of useful filters, including path, user attributes, device, and our brand-new clicked-element filter. Once you determine your unique filter power-combos, categorize them based on your hypotheses or research focus, keeping things organized and your team aligned.

• Capture snippets of your recordings and heatmaps using Highlights in Hotjar: group these insights together into 'Collections' for easy review. This provides cross-functional teams with a reliable methodology to identify patterns, validate assumptions, and prioritize brilliantly.

6. Run with your changes confidently

Relying on guesswork (or your boss' hunches) is one way to go about fixing website bugs or redesigning your homepage. But there are much more effective ways to move forward (have we made the cons clear enough?).

In validating assumptions, you can assess if there's enough user value in your idea: whether it's about a product, feature, solution, or any change on your site or app. In this way, you can proceed if it makes sense to do so.

7. Experiment and test changes to prioritize future updates

You’ll have to reduce assumptions and validate ideas throughout the product management lifecycle. But validation is not a standalone effort—it’s an essential part of product experimentation.

Product experimentation allows you to assess the impact of your solutions and improvements by conducting small-scale tests, embracing failures as you go, and continuously learning, iterating, and optimizing based on the results.

No team becomes proficient in experimentation and validation overnight. It can be tough to figure out how much to test, manage risks, or get everyone on the same page. But when done right, it brings a ton of value to product development.

Question your assumptions; make decisions quickly

Are you excited to try our simple framework for validating assumptions? You don’t need to be a scientist to turn assumptions into hypotheses and test them against actual user experience. 

From Recordings to Heatmaps and Feedback to Surveys, Hotjar has everything you need to remove the guesswork, predict whether changes will work, and make informed decisions for your users and product. 

Don’t let assumptions hold you back any longer. Take advantage of reliable user insights and start making bold moves with confidence sooner rather than later.